Well I promised two blog posts today, so even if I don’t have a lot to say I might as well follow through.

For the past week or so both my parents have been pretty sick. As a result, thanks to still being on vacation, I’ve become a more distinct guardian for my sister.

Which includes being the chauffeur. Which, by extension, meant getting up to drive her to school for zero period.

At 6:00 a.m.

Every day.

Needless to say she owed me a little something. Luckily tonight was her mini-band banquet, a potluck the RUHS Marching band holds halfway through the school year to celebrate the end of the competition season.

If there’s anything high school kids enjoy, it’s gorging on lots of food.

I’m more than happy to mooch.

The unfortunate downside of tagging along to mooch off free food is that the entire event, which hosts about 100 high schoolers and band parents, is held in the small gym on campus.

So imagine a bunch of people stuffed into a hot gymnasium wearing semi-formal attire, walking around on rolled out tarp.

As it turns out, band kids also enjoy breaking the flow of music to do silly things.

While it was admittedly hilarious seeing the older parents who have zero concept of internet memes cringe harder than I did, that didn’t stop me from cringing.

In fact, ridiculous high school antics were rampant throughout the event. The most stand-out of which for me being a girl walking around who apparently did not get the semi-formal memo because she wore a sleeveless crop top, leggings and heels.

I know that sounds like I was being a creep and judging what some high school girl was dressed in, but I swear she just stood out that much.

Outside of cringe-enducing high school antics, I suppose I can’t say I regret going. The food was a huge plus, and I have become at least pseudo-friends with some band parents simply because I’m around so often for Alyson. It’s nice catching up with them.

I even chatted with someone who was willing to give my business card out to someone who works at one of the local newspapers around Redondo Beach.

Always networking. Always.

But of course, it was also nice to support my sister.

Even if it meant getting a picture with this real creepy mannequin from their field show in the background.

Aly only has one more year of this stuff ahead of her (as much as I die inside every time I imagine her graduating high school so soon), so I might as well fill in as much time supporting her as I can before she probably heads across the country for music school.

… Just as long as she doesn’t do so until we finish Pokémon Let’s Go, Eevee together.

Context. After dropping Aly off at Cal State Long Beach this morning (the genesis of this Tweet that made me laugh):

Something tells me I’m contractually obligated to not like it here, but between the strange pathways and giant set pieces it feels like I’m wandering a whacky F-Zero track. I kinda dig it. pic.twitter.com/1pqAhEKaPj

I wound up going out to dinner tonight with a bunch of people from high school. A pretty diverse range of people at that — from those I’d consider good friends I hang out with regularly to some that I literally haven’t seen since graduation three years ago.

There were about 10 people there and I was right in the middle between two Korean BBQ hot plates.

On the bright side, I got to take food from both.

On the not so bright side, pretty sure I got whiplash trying to split my time between two totally different conversations. If not more considering those two major groups were further split into a number of subgroups.

That said, being somewhat ephemeral in each different conversation gave me time to reflect on other things. As I stipulated at the very top of this post, a lot of the things I wound up thinking about were concepts I’ve learned in my psych classes coming up in reality.

For instance: Right when I arrived, half the group wasn’t there. Long story short they were waiting for one person who was apparently out watching Into the Spider-Verse and didn’t realize the timing or something. They wound up being an hour late.

Though we wound up being at the restaurant for three hours as a result so… Maybe it was the wrong choice from a utilitarian social standpoint?

Me incidentally bug-eyed while checking my watch, with Nina caught in the background. Seemed like a good enough place to slip this in.

I’m here to talk about psychology though. Not philosophy.

This one girl and I thought we knew each other from something, but for the longest time all we knew was that we went to the same high school. We couldn’t figure out exactly HOW we knew one another.

It was a very ‘tip of the tongue’ moment up until I finally got just the primer I needed.

Found out that she was studying creative writing, and that pretty quickly translated to my realizing we must have been on the newspaper together at one point. And we were!

Long-term memory retrieval via priming. Classic.

But wait, my nerdiness gets worse.

See the Korean BBQ place we were at in Gardena had a call button for the servers:

My friend Nina got pretty obsessed with the button the longer the night went on. Whenever any of us even considered getting more food or water, she immediately hit the button.

It let out a very distinctive chime, like two doorbells ringing in sequence.

After the third or fourth call, one ring seemingly didn’t work. The servers were just busy helping other tables, but Nina seemed to get visibly distressed that the call hadn’t served its purpose.

For everyone else? This was pretty much nothing.

But for me? All I could see was a conditioned response being slowly extinguished by the removal of a response to the conditioned stimulus.

Pavlov would be proud.

I swear, this was 100 percent what was going through my head all night. No idea why, but it definitely happened.

That said it isn’t like all that school leaking in ruined the night. I actually had a great time catching up with some people I haven’t seen in a very long time, and I imagine I’ll probably go out with this particular group more often in the future!

Plus there were some extra added benefits. We actually ran into a totally different group of people from high school who I haven’t seen in years that just so happened to be eating at the same place.

The boba we got after wasn’t half bad, too.

That essentially sums up my day overall. Since it sparked this particular conversation, I guess it would be pertinent to ask all of you in the viewing audience if you’ve had any times where something you learned in school viscerally leaked into an everyday experience.

I’m sure someone has a fun story with that. As fun as school-related stories can be, anyway.

Got a late one for you, since interesting life stuff happened and that drove me to save my deep, contemplative “complains about Christmas” post for tomorrow.

I promise it’s not as bad as I hyperbole it out to be.

The family took a mini road trip out to Santa Monica tonight — random music mix out of iTunes and everything.

We met up with some of my Mom’s old college friends for dinner at the Plan Check Kitchen + Bar (pictured above) because they’re out here from Washington D.C. for Winter Break.

The table wound up getting split between the four adults catching up and the four kids more or less meeting each other for the first time, and even though I’m in a window that’s well past the high school-age problems all the younger kids were discussing, it was a good time. Food was nice, as were the atmosphere and company with that flashy Santa Monica pier right outside.

Can’t complain overall. In fact, I wound up making this joke out of the menu that killed me because I’m lame:

“Oyster Power?”

That’s for all you Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fans out there.

Nailed it.

With all that being said, I wouldn’t want to waste an entire blog post just talking in vague generalities about a cool little family/friend dinner.

Nah, I’ve gotta take this time to talk about the one part of the night that I can complain about.

This place we went to had the absolute weirdest, arguably worst bathroom decor that I’ve ever seen in a restaurant.

It was so bad in fact that I decided to take a picture of it too — no private parts or dirty bathroom things involved.

I promise.

Unless you count bad paper towel throwing, I suppose…

So let’s break this down. It’s not a particularly large restroom, first off. There’s nothing wrong with a single-person bathroom, but having one means you need to compact the space well.

That said, the fact that this bathroom had both a urinal and a traditional sitting toilet seems a bit over the top for the space constraint.

A single toilet that serves both purposes needed for it would be more than enough.

But then there’s the real… How you say… Je ne sais quoi that got my mind racing about its sheer absurdity in the first place.

Despite having such a small space, they decided to put two mirrors in the bathroom. One of which is a full-body mirror.

Literally right next to the urinal.

To be fair, BOTH the full-body and sink mirrors were essentially surrounding the urinal. I swear, if one of those things was a foot over you would be trapped in the infinite mirror dimension just standing at the head.

Even without the trippy aspect of that, it was still bizarre and seemingly narcissistic to see a bathroom designed to essentially let you look at yourself no matter where you turned your head.

I know that out of all the strange things I’ve nitpicked on this blog, the mirror placement in a Santa Monica restaurant is arguably the strangest.

It just bugged me enough that I figured it would be worth bothering you all on your Christmas Eves over it.

Because you know. I’m literally not thinking about the holiday at all. Celebrate if you are, I’ll just be here thinking about bathroom mirrors.

If I have any people to thank for just about all of the great stuff that has happened to me over the last three+ years, Bonnie Stewart has to be a big one.

Today, current and old members of the Daily Titan staff threw our favorite advisor a surprise party before her retirement from CSUF.

It was a sad day not just for all of us in the newsroom who have come to love Bonnie over her last five-and-a-half years advising the school’s newspaper, but also for nature in general apparently. The universe itself seemed to cry at the idea of her moving on from all of us students.

In this case I suppose I can blame it on the torrential downpour, which necessitated me to take a picture from inside the cozy warmth of a Starbucks post-meeting in the Honors Center rather than getting my phone drenched. I’m not kidding, it really came down like cats and dogs.

Pretty sure I hydroplaned at least once on the freeway going in this morning, and it was extra fun having copious amounts of water splash up against my windshield from adjacent cars.

… Alright maybe that’s enough complaining about the rain. This is supposed to be something of a celebratory ‘thank you’ kind of post after all.

Plus the rain had dried up by the time I left at about 6:00 p.m., four hours or so after the party for Bonnie began.

Nailed the transition

I wasn’t expecting the party to be very long or busy, but I’m glad I was wrong. Not only was it great seeing a packed newsroom show up to celebrate Bonnie, but a lot of those people were friends I haven’t had the chance to catch up with for a while!

Also, it gave my mom an opportunity to do some holiday baking for a crowd outside the usual suspects. By the end of the night there were only three pieces of her coffee cake left, and Bonnie liked it so much that she was happy to take the recipe.

While it was nice catching up with people like Kyle Bender, Amy Wells or Darlene Casas, meeting some older staff members like Samuel Mountjoy, Julia Gutierrez and Michael Huntley, and just generally schmoozing with a bunch of people and food, obviously Bonnie was the lady of the hour.

I’ve actually known about her retirement longer than most (from what I’m aware), as she was one of the first people I had approached to possibly be a mentor for my Honors Project. She had to turn me down since she wouldn’t have been around long enough to see the project through, and since then I’ve had to keep that little secret under lock-and-key.

Feels pretty nice to not have to hold onto it any longer… But it feel even more nice knowing that she trusted me with the secret in the first place.

Three+ years of working with Bonnie has undoubtedly made me a better person and a better journalist/writer/academic/anything, really. Any award I’ve received while at Cal State Fullerton, as well as any internship I’ve gotten as a result of my time at the Daily Titan, can all be tied back to her influence in some respect.

It was bittersweet to imagine her not having that same influence on others going forward as a result. But I know she’s off to do great things even in retirement, and I’m as excited to see where she lands as I’m sure she’s excited to see me (and all her students) land in jobs they deserve.

It also made me feel better enough to justify spending extra time getting into writing on the old blog here!

Which completely defeats the purpose of my giving myself the out yesterday… But hey. I did say I have messed up priorities there.

I would also argue that going to the gym tonight helped me burn off some of the stress. Which yes, I know makes this into just another post-gym posting for me.

Except this time the topic I wanted to delve into is only related to going to the gym.

While working out tonight I spent some time listening to the Nerdsync podcast. I’m positive I’ve talked about them before in one of my “YouTube Recommendations” posts, but in essence Nerdsync is a YouTube channel that I came across while getting more into the comic book scene over the summer which really thrives on intellectual takes on subjects in (mostly) superhero comics.

Highly recommended.

After getting through all of the video content there I discovered there was a podcast starring the channel’s main head Scott and his friends Chris and Bryce. Since then I’ve been listening through the ~130 episode backlog during my daily commutes.

Episode 89, which I happened to be listening to while lifting weights, was one of their recurring Trivia Challenge podcasts where the three guys make up quizzes for one another based on obscure comic book or pop culture stuff.

Through the episode I discovered something so hilarious that it not only killed off more of my stress, but also probably added a few years onto my lifespan.

In the golden age of DC Comics, around the 1950s, there was a series of stories under the title of “Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.” It’s one of Scott’s favorite things and has become one of mine as well because it’s quite literally the goofiest stuff you’ve ever seen Superman involved with, to the point that most of it doesn’t even sound real.

That’s the case with this particular Jimmy Olsen comic, Volume 113 from June of 1956.

In essence, this was a story in which Superman tried to convince Jimmy he was in a dream after the reporter accidentally got a photo of Clark Kent changing into the superhero attire. He did so by doing ridiculous things like duplicating eggs.

If that wasn’t already wild enough, take a look at the cover in which everything is exactly the same… Except Superman is upside-down.

Yet even if that’s a trustworthy source, I still cannot believe that this is an actual thing that exists. Not only is it a ridiculous premise, but the fact that they decided Superman being upside-down was whacky enough to grace the cover of the book is astounding to me.

He flies! It’s not weird that he can turn upside down!

Everything is just… So good about this.

So, so good.

After hearing that this excited I needed to share it with the world. Because hopefully it can help you all feel better about life as it has for me.

In that case I’m sure you also remember that I decided to go with this 7-Up ad.

Boy is it more and more beautiful every time I see it.

I bring up the subject again because I started to work on the actual paper itself yesterday evening and already the damn thing has taken me down a bizarre rabbit hole.

A rabbit hole that, in all honesty, is pretty interesting. If you ask me at least.

Here’s some more in-depth context before I get into that branch of my research. The content requirements for the essay are relatively straight forward. We simply have to examine the image we chose from the six perspectives that were elaborated in earlier in the semester:

Personal — Our gut reactions to the image.

Historical — How the context of the time shaped the image.

Technical — What techniques and elements went into creating the image.

Ethical — Would ethical philosophers find the creation or use of the image justified?

Cultural — What symbols can be found in the image that relate it to the culture of the time.

Critical — Taking a second, more objective look at the image now that all of the analysis isdone to see how thoughts and opinions might have changed.

My deep dive began as I broached into the historical aspects of the advertisement.

Most of the analysis was easy enough. The ad comes from the 1950s, so there was plenty to discuss as far as the post-war economic boom and opening stages of the Cold War went. Both contributed to the development of a middle class American ‘nuclear family’ that in many ways became dependent on purchasing power to show their status and connection to the mainstream culture.

What I looked into had nothing to do with that overall historical context. Instead it came from pinpointing a very specific part of the advertisement.

In the lower right-hand corner there’s a block of text which, among other things, tries to convince new parents to feed their babies a “wholesome” mix of 7-Up and milk.

More important to point out for my purposes is the section where the advertisers tell readers that they have all the ingredients in 7-Up listed on the bottle — despite the fact that it was not required.

When I read that I stared at the screen for a moment mulling things over. Were food labels not required in the 1950s? There was a Food and Drug Administration overlooking those matters at that point in time, wasn’t there?

It was a bit of a tangent, sure, but if I found the idea so interesting it seemed like a good research avenue to go down.

… Only in part because I needed a few more sources to fit the requirement and some U.S. government resources seemed official enough to justify using. I promise.

I found that, yes, the FDA did exist prior to the publication of this 7-Up advertisement. The FDA came into place alongside the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act in 1906 according to the horse’s mouth.

However, labels on food like you see required today, with their widely enumerated requirements that are stipulated upon in this most recent FDA Food Labeling Guide from 2013, were not required until the passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA). Prior to that, listing things like ingredients and nutritional information of food product labels were purely voluntary.

So it seems like the 7-Up people were right in congratulating themselves for posting that kind of information on their product in the 1950s.

According to this source, the NLEA wasn’t officially passed until November 1990.

That’s almost 90 years after the FDA first came into being. It’s astounding to me that it took that long to get this kind of legislation passed!

Perhaps that’s hindsight bias in some respect. Food labels are so ubiquitous in the 21st century, and they’re the butt of so many jokes about GMOs and fake ingredients, that it’s hard to imagine a time they weren’t in use.

I’m sure it seems a bit narcissistic and self-serving to dedicate a whole post to my own blog’s analytics out of nowhere. Especially considering the last time I did this kind of thing when I hit 100 Twitter followers over the summer, I didn’t have 100 for that much longer.

By now I have some number fluctuating around 110 or so, to be fair.

But that’s beside the point. I assure you that narcissism has nothing to do with this.

If anything, to lampshade myself appropriately, this is just a result of having no idea what to talk about to fill today’s gap.

Otherwise my choices would have been the mandatory internship class orientation I attended today (but it was kind of a waste of time and I already complained about school this week), my fluctuating inner conflict over going to the gym tonight (I decided to just go tomorrow on account of my big lunch food coma™ (thanks Mimi) ) or Fire Emblem Heroes (except the new banner comes out tomorrow, so you’ll have to wait a day for that).

For the reasons I stipulated in the parenthesis up there, I decided not to go with any of the above.

However, while doing some soul-searching and just staring at my blog to try to figure out what I was in the mood to write, I came across something that piqued my interest. In traffic analytics, of all things.

I’ve talked about the analytics that WordPress offers briefly in the past, during my 2018 New Year’s Eve post. In that post I looked at the large overall increase in views from 2016 to 2017 when I got slightly more interested in writing blog stuff.

By the end of this year it’s going to be an even bigger story considering the inherent jump that came from me writing a post just about every day. I’ll get to that story in about a month.

Today, however, I’m looking at more of a small-scale moment in recent history. Recent history meaning approximately two days ago.

Boy I know I said this wasn’t a narcissistic, self-serving post but I sure am calling back to a lot of things, aren’t I?

ANYWAY, all of that was to set up the analytics I noticed from that toy opening post.

That’s a hell of a sudden spike for that one post.

Sure, we can be cynical and talk about how that’s still only about 40 people when I on average reach about 20 people. But that’s still a 100 percent increase.

I don’t know, I think it’s pretty cool to see.

Plus while I was looking at that, I happened to also briefly look back at the ‘countries’ tab of the analytics. Aly told me she let her friends know that we shot a stupid video, so I wanted to see if it was purely a U.S. demographic that picked up on the post.

What I found was that as of, say, 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 20, 2018, here was the spread of people visiting my blog:

Mostly the U.S., as I would have thought. But also Taiwan and France!

Don’t know who’s out there reading this blog in Taiwan and France, but I’d be very interested to know how you all perceive the mad ramblings I embark on.

Oh, but that’s not all folks. I didn’t just look at today’s visitation statistics.

I looked at an entire week’s worth:

Check out the diverse spread of yellow. I know those are just one or two people compared to the 81 individuals in America that came in over the last week, but still.

The fact that a stupid, silly blog some college student in Redondo Beach, California rambles into on a whim can reach this kind of international audience continues to astound me. It’s probably the only thing that has really, truly made me care about things like analytics and search engine optimization.

Everything I do on the old blog here I do for me. But seeing the kind of reach my personal business has is just incredible.

…

Gosh that definitely came out sounding self-serving again didn’t it?

I’m just going to cut my losses and leave things there. Look forward to tomorrow when I write about Fire Emblem again and probably kill all interest in anyone coming back!

After a lovely family lunch at Mama D’s with my grandparents to celebrate my Grandpa Joe’s belated birthday, Alyson made me take her over to Target.

She didn’t need anything. She just wanted to wander aimlessly and kill time.

To be fair I do that sort of thing with my friends constantly, to the point where we covertly call ourselves the ‘Loiter Bois,’ so I couldn’t argue. In fact I was pretty into the idea. Especially considering Pokémon Let’s Go Eevee & Pikachu just came out and I was interested in seeing it on shelves as I start to prepare my holiday wish list.

But then something happened. Idly wandering the video game and toy aisles making fun of things turned into more when she found this rip-off Lego Pokémon toy of one of my favorites:

Isn’t Mimikyu just the cutest? Who needs Pikachu when you’ve got one of them, huh?

On the one hand, I don’t know why I let her convinced me to buy this thing. I just started cleaning my room up for the Thanksgiving Break, and having another little figurine to take up space seems counterintuitive. Plus, when I say this thing was a Lego rip-off, I mean it is like a real cheap Lego rip-off.

Just look at how weirdly confusing and unintuitive these instructions are.

Somehow it manages to take a Lego figurine made out of ~20 pieces and not distinctly separate out which pieces are what for big chunks of the instructions. It took some time to figure out which parts went where.

But at the very least I suppose these Mega Construx are similar to Lego in that they have just random extra pieces for no reason.

Where do you go, random circle piece? I don’t see you anywhere in the instructions.

Granted I did just complain that the instructions were unintuitive so maybe I’m just missing something… But oh well.

On the other hand, despite those points, I really can’t complain about the purchase. It was maybe six dollars for a pseudo-figurine of one of my favorite Pokémon and it came with a Premiere Ball, which is also probably my favorite kind of Poké Ball.

Its creepy long neck might just haunt me in my dreams, but I’ll happily suffer that fate for Mimikyu.

However, I didn’t just buy this fake Lego. I was pretty close to putting it down and not buying anything because it just didn’t seem worth it to get one item. Especially if that one item was a dumb toy like this.

So my sister made up for it by buying another toy while we were there:

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Yeah that’s right, I know you’ve seen these kinds of dumb collectible packs for every popular culture property in existence.

Well we got one to open up for ourselves just for the hell of it. Even though the movie isn’t out yet as of my writing this, so who knows if it’ll be worth supporting fringe toy-based ventures for it.

All I know is it definitely became worth it when we decided to do this jokey, vague toy opening YouTube channel parody just to put here on the old blog.

See? Even though I make fun of her a bunch on here, she’s still more than happy to make herself look stupid alongside me when the time comes.

I guess this is the part where I would tell you all to like, comment and subscribe to my channel like every cliché in the book tells me I should? But honestly I just use that thing as a dumping place for videos that I want to throw up on my blog, as WordPress has kind of terrible compression when videos and such are concerned.

But that’s going way into the weeds for no reason. I just wanted to share the fun, silly thing my sister and I did today.

So far I’ve had decent results in the latter two departments, and even if I don’t personally see the difference my family has noted that I’m beginning to look a bit thinner.

In terms of tangible numbers, I haven’t been doing a lot to keep track. If anything I figured forcing myself to stand on a scale every week would just kill my motivation when the number moves incrementally.

Intrinsically I understand that weight loss takes time, of course.

I’m just worried that the raging, emotional segment of my lizard brain would see that result and get me to try quitting.

Thus today became the first real barometer of how I’m doing from a statistical standpoint. A month-and-a-half ago I was weighed at my annual physical and jotted down that I was about 207 lbs.

(A purely American metric that won’t help any of you off using that other, more ubiquitous system, but it makes the most sense to me.)

When I stepped on the scale at the start of my appointment this morning, fearful of anything above where my “starting point” was, I wound up (as previously mentioned) pleasantly surprised.

I was 204 lbs.

Now I don’t know if a net loss of three-ish pounds over a month+ is a good fraction or whatever. I ain’t a nutritionist after all.

All I know is the fact that I’ve been able to lose the weight I had through my exercising is a great sign that should help motivate me going forward. After all that loss comes without any significant change to my diet, which I know is equally important to being healthier and losing weight.

What can I say… I like cheeseburgers. Like a lot.

At least now I can confirm that I’m counterbalancing them if nothing else.

But wait, there’s more!

Honestly my morning was going to balance out that weight loss elation with the more dejected outlook brought on by finding out my last Sensation and Perception midterm went… Just okay. Normally not a problem except that my overall GPA dropped due to a lack of things in the grade-book.

But then the blood tests came back (since I was at the hematologist office), and we found out that my blood cell count is up right now!

I’m sure I’ve given this context before somewhere, but just in case anyone is unaware: I have ITP.

It’s a blood disorder with an insanely long actual name that basically means I have significantly a low blood platelet count. Around the 20s when an average range is in the mid-100s.

Ostensibly the disorder does nothing in my every day life. It just means I might have problems should something happen where I end up bleeding significantly.

When the diagnosis first came and I dealt with a rollercoaster of treatments that at one point landed me in the hospital (which was more than a year ago now crazily enough), I wasn’t very keen on talking about it.

But hey, it’s been more than a year and nothing significant has gone down. So I think I’m feeling way better about discussing the whole thing.

Long context aside, the lede I’ve been burying is that today my blood platelet count is up from about 24 the last time we checked to about 35 today.

It could just be a general fluctuation, but all progress in the positive is good progress I’d say!

Between that and my weight, this doctor’s appointment left me feeling pretty good about myself. From a physical standpoint especially.

Sure, those positive vibes led right into the mundane of going to Fullerton for one single class… But Thanksgiving Break technically starts tomorrow.